Home is where the heart is

I had a rather different Christmas last year than the past ones... for one thing, my younger brother Dodi is in the Middle East. He usually did our video coverage and kept the overall energy of the party up. He would put up the disco lights outside the house, bring out the speakers and play Christmas and dance tunes.

And then my parents said they could not be able to cook anymore like they used to, so they told us to just celebrate Christmas eve in our respective homes, then visit them on Christmas Day instead. So my elder sister agreed, and our youngest decided to go to the province to celebrate Christmas with her husband's family.

It was a totally different Christmas from all those years where we celebrated it at my parents' house. It felt rather odd. I will definitely want to celebrate this year's holiday with them.

At any rate, we made the best of the holidays by preparing food and inviting my wife's brother's family and my mother-in-law to spend Christmas eve at our place.

Here I am cooking the barbecue. It's the first time we tried using this electric grill. The barbecue tasted strange using this contraption, a wedding gift from four years ago. When we didn't like the taste, we decided to go for charcoal grilling instead. That was more like it!
Here I am at the kitchen with my brother-in-law slicing and dicing away.
Jo-Lo with his cousins from Tina's side of the family.
We played cards while having red wine during a lull in the night activities.
Loads of gifts to open! We did not put these under the tree because Jo-Lo would have a field day with these.


We had our noche buena and opened gifts. It was a simple yet fun holiday for us all. Head on over to Jo-Lo's blog for photos with my parents!